While many Buddhists are rightly committed to working in the public sphere for the
resolution of suffering, there are very real incompatibilities between the axiomatic
concepts and strategic biases of (the dominant strands of) both current human rights
discourse and social activism and such core Buddhist practices as seeing all things as
interdependent, impermanent, empty, and karmically configured. Indeed, the almost
startling successes of social activism have been ironic, hinging on its strategic and
conceptual indebtedness to core values shared with the technological and ideological
forces that have sponsored its own necessity. The above-mentioned Buddhist practices
provide a way around the critical blind spot instituted by the marriage of Western
rationalism, a technological bias toward control, and the axiomatic status of individual
human being, displaying the limits of social activism's institutional approach to change
and opening concrete possibilities for a dramatically Buddhist approach to changing the
way societies change.

Formally established tolerance of dissent and
internal critique has become a mark of distinction among contemporary societies. Indeed,
with economic globalization and the rhetoric of democracy acting in practically
unassailable concert, the imperative to establish and maintain the conditions under which
political protest and social activism are possible has become the keystone challenge to
developing nations throughout Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

It is not my intention here to question the legitimacy of this
challenge. The possibility of dissent is crucial to realizing a truly responsive society
capable of correcting its own errors of judgement and organizational practice, and
institutional changes of the sort brought about by political protest and social activism
have undeniably been instrumental in this process. What I want to question are the
prevalent strategies for bringing about such corrections and the axiological
presuppositions on which they pivot. Although it may be true that "nothing succeeds
like success," it is also true that nothing more readily blinds us to inherent flaws
in the means and meaning of our successes than 'success' itself. Critical inattention to
the strategic axioms underlying the successful engineering of political and social change
might, in other words, finally render our best-intended efforts self-defeating.

My thesis, then, is a disquieting one: social activism's successes have
hinged on its strategic and conceptual indebtedness to core values shared with the
technological and ideological forces that have sponsored its own necessity. That is, the
same conditions that have made successful social activism possible have also made it
necessary. With potentially tragic irony, social activist practices -- and theory -- have
been effectively reproducing rather than truly reducing the conditions of
institutionalized disadvantage and dependence.

In a liberal democratic context, such a thesis verges on political and
philosophical heresy, and if we are hard pressed to take it seriously, it is only because
the positive and progressive nature of the changes wrought by social activism are so
manifestly self-evident. Unfortunately, if our prevailing standards of reason and critical
inquiry are not entirely neutral, the manifestly positive and progressive nature of social
activism's history might be the result of a critical blind-spot. In that case, the ironic
nature of social activist success would be effectively invisible.

As a way around any such critical lacunae, I will be appealing to such
core Buddhist practices as seeing all things as impermanent, as karmically configured, and
as empty or interdependent. These practices and the theories adduced in their support mark
a radical inversion of the critical and logical priorities constitutive of the
philosophical, religious, and political traditions that have governed our dominant
conceptions of freedom and civil society. By systematically challenging our bias for
subordinating values to facts, relationships to the related, uniqueness to universality,
and contribution to control, Buddhist practice makes possible a meaningful assessment and
revision of social activist strategy. Importantly, it also opens the possibility of
critically evaluating the phenomenon of "engaged Buddhism" and its ostensibly
corrective relationship with the root conditions of suffering.

Until now, social activists have been able to effectively contest
institutionalized disadvantage and dependence at the institutional level, securing basic
civil and human rights by using many of the same values and technologies employed in first
establishing and then maintaining structural inequity. To the extent that it has been
noted, the shared genealogy of social activist solutions and the problems they address has
been subsumed under the rubric of a pragmatically justified separation of means and ends.
If the present critique has any merit, our thankfulness for the apparent gains made by
social activists in promoting basic human dignities must not be allowed to distract us
from appreciating the rapidity with which we are approaching a point of no return beyond
which fighting fire with fire will no longer be an option.

Caution on the Tracks: Recognizing the
Possibility of Technological Barriers to the Meaning of Social Change

Andrew Kimbrell (in Mills, 1997, p. 105) has noted that if technology
is "the primary engine of social change you can't promote social change without
changing technology." The corollary of this is that failing to change our
technological bias means failing to promote any shift in the direction or meaning
of social change. Absent such a shift, successful social activism will increasingly mean
at once the amplification and deepening subtlety of the problems it has ostensibly
addressed and solved.

We can begin sorting out the roots of this apparent paradox by noting
some of the common hallmarks of successful social activism. In contrast with most
religious eschatologies, the salvific efforts of social activism have been directed toward
securing the rights and freedoms, not of unique persons or communities, but of individuals
sharing membership in a particular class -- be it defined economically, ethnically,
racially, religiously, or by age or sexual orientation. While social activists do not deny
the importance and even necessity of uniquely personal forms of human development, they
typically maintain that these are not sufficient means of rectifying systemic or
structural injustice. Thus, while it is all well and good for a particular woman to break
through the glass ceiling of corporate management, it is the proper aim of social activism
to realize conditions under which all women will be guaranteed the possibility of
such success. Society, and not just the human beings it comprises, must change.

Presumably, this is not most "efficiently" done by changing
individual minds and habits, but by revising the structure of interactions obtaining among
classes of people. Changing societies in any usefully short period of time depends on the
mass reorganization of their structural features. Granted this, social activist success
necessarily pivots on leveraging the powers that organize a society by cultivating and
making incisive use of the power to organize. Social activism consists of consolidating
power to redistribute power, in this way undermining injustice and structural
inequity. Of course, relocating any controlling advantage -- either within or among
societies -- requires much more than good intentions. First and foremost it needs a
capacity for attracting and directing attention on a massive scale and an insider's
understanding of the prevailing culture of power. Without these, social activist efforts
are doomed from the point of conception onward to be exercises in mere wishful thinking.

A critical history of social activism is thus inseparable from the
history of technologies that make possible the widespread command of attention and the
selective biasing of power. Indeed, without the technologies that spawned the printing
press, radio, television, and now the Internet, social activism would have been restricted
to the charitable dreams of those already in power or both able and willing to violently
usurp them.

The inseparability of these histories has for the most part been
considered natural and unproblematic. But consider the complex political roles played by
various forms of mass media since the turn of the century -- from widely distributed print
news, to radio, television, and now the Internet. There is no denying that the media have
provided an indispensable means of promoting such social activist causes as the women's
suffrage movement, trade unionism, and civil rights, but they also served as a forum for
the kind of mass advertising essential to the constitution of a distinctively American
consumer culture, its expansion into global markets, and the corporate consolidation of
economic advantage worldwide.

Thus, although winning women's voting rights can be correlated with
high circulation print and photography media, so can the construction of the twentieth
century's various "ideal" body images and canons of beauty. These images and
standards can be further correlated with epidemic eating disorders, mass consumption of
cosmetics and quarterly fashions, the commodification of ethnic features, and the
universal standardization of body language. Similarly, although it was possible in 1968
for African-American athletes to use worldwide television coverage of the Olympic track
and field events in Mexico City to protest the continued abuse of minority rights in the
United States, in 1998 the global cost of televised advertising well exceeded the
worldwide total of all national expenditures for primary and secondary education.
Television serves as an apparent forum for protest, but also as a means of schooling
consumers en masse for optimal market performance.

If the relationship between social activism and such means of influence
as printing presses and Internet-linked computers was a purely instrumental one, there
might be little cause for concern about these intertwined histories. Indeed, the illusion
of such a relationship is beautifully summed up in the image of a generation "turning
swords into plowshares" -- transforming, for example, the military-built Internet
into a tool for free self-expression. Unfortunately, it is only at great risk that
technologies can be reduced to the tools they spawn and evaluated on the basis of each
tool's individual utility. Doing so commits us to continuously rehearsing the central
premise of the widely prevailing myth that technologies as such are value-neutral. They
are not. Turning swords into plowshares does not finally mean the peaceful application of
war technologies, but the practical declaration of war on the earth and against its varied
plant and animal populations.

I have argued at some length (Hershock, 1999) that evaluating
technologies on the basis of the tools they generate commits us to taking individual users
and not the dramatic patterns of our lived interdependence as the primary locus of
evaluation. In doing so, we effectively exclude from consideration precisely that domain
in which the values informing our technological bias have the most direct bearing on the
quality of our personal and communal conduct -- the movement of our shared narration. This
has led to a stubborn and at times even righteous blindness regarding our slippage into a
new era of colonization -- a colonization, not of lands or cultural spheres, but of
consciousness as such. Indeed, the disposition to ignore the critical space of
interdependence has been so thoroughly prevalent that the conditions of possibility for
this new form of colonialism are widely championed -- in both the "developed"
and the "developing" world -- as essential to establishing and safeguarding our
individual and collective dignity, a crucial component of our growing equality and
autonomy.

By using the same information technologies employed by those
individuals and institutions perpetrating and perpetuating the inequitable distribution of
power and wealth, social activists may have enjoyed the opportunity to "beat them at
their own game." However, they have also insured that everyone remains on the same
playing field, playing the same game. Social activist successes have in this way blinded
us to our deepening submission to technologies of control and the consequent depletion of
precisely those attentive resources needed to meaningfully accord with our changing
circumstances and contribute to them as needed.

The costs of such blindness are practically limitless. The more
"successful" a technology is, the more indispensable it becomes. That is, all
technologies are liable to crossing thresholds beyond which they generate more new
problems than they solve. Because technologies arise as patterns of value-driven conduct,
they function as ambient amplifiers of our individual and cultural karma -- our
experience-conditioning, intentional activity. In crossing the threshold of their utility,
technologies create the karmic equivalent of a gravitational black hole, funneling all
available attention-energy into themselves. For the dominant technological lineage
correlated with the rise of liberal democracy and the imperative for social activism, this
has meant an intensification of our karma for both controlling and being controlled. The
more successfully we extend the limits of control, the more we extend the range of what
can and must be controlled. In capsule form: the better we get at getting what we want,
the better we get at wanting; but the better we get at wanting, the better we get at
getting what we want, though we won't want what we get. This karmic circularity is
pernicious, and the attention-energy invested in it to date has already brought about an
epidemic depletion of precisely those resources needed for realizing dramatically
satisfying -- and not merely factually sufficient -- solutions to our troubles, both
personal and communal.

The methodological irony of social activism is that it does not free us
from dependence, but rather sustains its very possibility. This is not as paradoxical as
it might sound. Insuring our independence by means of restructuring the institutions that
mediate our contact with one another renders us dependent on those institutions -- on the
structure, and hence the technologies, of our mediation. In consequence, our freedom comes
to be increasingly dependent on the rationalization and regulation of our relationships
with one another -- the realization of secure and yet generic co-existence. Just as the
technology-driven transformation of societies in the industrial and post-industrial eras
has involved an ever more detailed refinement of class divisions and labor categories,
social activism advances through an ever more varied identification of populations in
need of guaranteed freedoms.

In valorizing both autonomy and equality, social activism denies our
dramatic interdependence and tacitly endorses not-seeing (avidyaa) or not-attending
to the full set of conditions sponsoring our present situation. Although unique and deeply
local patterns of injustice may be important in building a legal case, the work of social
activism is not to encourage our liberating intimacy with such patterns. Rather, it
consists of constructing legal mechanisms for exerting reformative control over
institutional structures and the processes by means of which (generically) given
individuals play or are forced to play particular roles therein.

Unfortunately, as generic 'women', 'children', 'workers', or
'minorities', the beneficiaries of social activism are effectively cut off from precisely
those aspects of their circumstances, relationships, and self-understanding which provide
them with the resources necessary for locally realizing meaningful -- and not merely
factual -- alternatives to the patterns of injustice in which they find themselves
embedded. Among the products of social activism are thus virtual communities of
individuals having no immediate and dramatically responsive relationship with one another
-- individuals who have relinquished or been deprived of intimate connection with the
causes and conditions of both their troubles and those troubles' meaningful resolution.

With no intended disregard of the passion many activists bring to their
work, social activism has aimed at globally re-engineering our political, economic and
societal environments in much the same way that our dominant technological lineage has
been committed to re-making our world -- progressively "humanizing" and
"rationalizing" the abundantly capricious natural circumstances into which we
human beings have found ourselves "thrown." This shared strategic genealogy is
particularly disturbing, suggesting that -- like all technologies oriented toward control
-- social activism is liable to rendering itself indispensable. If the history of social
activism is inseparable from the rise and spread of influential technologies and subject
to similar accelerating and retarding conditions, so is its future.

Social Activist Strategy: Legally Leveraging
Institutional Change

While it has become common practice to decry the excessive legalism of
contemporary societies, the ramifications of strategic collusion between social activism
and the way we have technically and legally tooled our factual co-existence have remained
largely unattended. In part, this is because the legal bias of social activism has
appeared so incontestably "practical." Legislation allows for directly
restructuring power relations and negotiating justice at the "highest" possible
levels. The legislative process has also become the dominant technology for mediating
divergent claims about the facts of our (often troubled) co-existence and for preserving
"fair" definitions of 'being right' and 'being wronged'.

The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, the
more successful legislation becomes, the more it renders itself necessary. Because it aims
at rigorous definition -- at establishing hard boundaries or limits -- crossing the
threshold of legislative utility means creating conditions under which the definition of
freedom becomes so complex as to be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end,
legally-biased social activism is thus liable to effect an infinite density of protocols
for maintaining autonomy, generating a matrix of limits on discrimination that would
finally be conducive to what might be called "axiological entropy" -- a state in
which movement in any direction is equally unobstructed and empty of dramatic
potential. Contrary to expectations, complete "freedom of choice" would not mean
the elimination of all impediments to meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of
the latter's conditions of possibility.

The effectiveness and efficiency of "hard," control-biased
technologies depend on our using natural laws -- horizons of possibility -- as fulcrums
for leveraging or dictating changes in the structure of our circumstances. Unlike
improvised contributions to changes taking place in our situation, dictating the terms of
change effectively silences our situational partners. Technological authority thus renders
our circumstances mute and justifies ignoring the contributions that might be made by the
seasons or the spiritual force of the mountains to the meaning -- the direction of
movement -- of our ongoing patterns of interdependence. With the "perfection" of
technically-mediated control, our wills would know no limit. We would be as gods, existing
with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason
to do one thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear.

Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable
as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast energies of global capital are committed to
moving in its direction, for the most part quite uncritically. The consequences -- as
revealed in the desecration and impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness
(for instance, the rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident. The
critical question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of
legally-biased and controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and
desecration.

The analogy between the dependence of technological progress on natural
laws and that of social activism on societal laws is by no means perfect. Except among a
scattering of philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are
not viewed as changeable artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy
need only focus our attention on the way legal institutions -- like natural laws -- do not
prescriptively determine the shape of all things to come, but rather establish generic
limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually admissible. Laws that
guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others. Without the
fulcrums of unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would remain as purely
idealistic as using wishful thinking to move mountains. Changing legal institutions at
once forces and enforces societal reform.

By affirming and safeguarding those freedoms or modes of autonomy that
have come to be seen as generically essential to 'being human', a legally-biased social
activism cannot avoid selectively limiting the ways we engage with one another. The
absence of coercion may be a basic aim of social activism, but if our autonomy is to be
guaranteed both fair and just, its basic strategy must be one of establishing
non-negotiable constraints on how we co-exist. Social activism is thus in the business of
striking structural compromises between its ends and its means -- between particular
freedoms and general equality, and between practical autonomy and legal anonymity. By
shifting the locus of freedoms from unique persons to generic citizens -- and in
substantial sympathy with both the Platonic renunciation of particularity and the
scientific discounting of the exceptional and extraordinary -- social activist methodology
promotes dramatic anonymity in order to universally realize the operation of 'blind
justice'.

Much as hard technologies of control silence the contributions of
wilderness and turn us away from the rewards of a truly joint improvisation of order, the
process of social activism reduces the relevance of the always unique and unprecedented
terrain of our interdependence. This is no small loss. The institutions that guarantee our
generic independence effectively pave over those vernacular relationships through which
our own contributory virtuosity might be developed and shared -- relationships out of
which the exceptional meaning of our immediate situation might be continuously realized.
In contrast with Buddhist emptiness -- a practice that entails attending to the mutual
relevance of all things -- both the aims and strategies of social activism are conducive
to an evacuation of the conditions of dramatic virtuosity, a societal depletion of our
resources for meaningfully improvised and liberating intimacy with all things.

Giving up the Ghost and the Machine: A
Buddhist Critique of the Technologies of Autonomous Selfhood

For the social activist, independence and freedom are inconceivable
without secure boundaries between who we 'are' and who and what we 'are-not'. The rhetoric
of Western liberalism is that we must be free to resist subordinating, institutional
definition -- free, that is, to assert or claim boundaries that are finally self-willed,
even idiosyncratic. Freedom, so construed, depends on limited responsibility, limited
demands on our time and attention. As the Platonic analogy above suggests, regulation is
essential to identity precisely because we are essentially rational beings -- beings who
measure and who can be measured; who divide the world into near and far, private and
public; who thrive on distinctions of every sort, in fact. Securing the integrity of the
individual members of a given class of people in a given society is at bottom a process of
legal rationalization -- the creation of an anonymously ordered and yet
autonomy-supporting domain. The aims of social activism may be ostensibly 'selfless', but
in practice social activism directs us toward the increasing regulation and generic
preservation of selfishness.

But what if there are no truly individual selves to preserve? What if
interdependence and the unprecedented are basic, and not -- as presumed by social
activism's philosophical and religious parent traditions -- the competitive dichotomies of
'self' and 'other', 'independence' and 'dependence', 'free will' and 'determinism',
'order' and 'chaos', 'permanence' and 'change', 'universality' and 'particularity', 'fact'
and 'value', 'subject' and 'object', or 'agent' and 'acted-upon'? Quite clearly, it is the
tension between the members of these axial pairings that has largely compelled political,
social, and spiritual revolution in the Western tradition. If these should turn out to be
wholly contingent cultural artifacts and not 'natural features' of our world, can a social
activism presuming them ever truly avoid replicating the conditions of their continued
possibility?

By linking freedom and equality, and by associating the former with
individual autonomy and the latter with legal anonymity, social activism both reflects and
works in concert with the conditions sponsoring our intensifying sense of a tension
between the personal and communal, between each one of us and our situation. It is this
tension -- and the threat it poses to our identification of who we 'are' and 'are-not' --
that disposes us toward legally, if only generically, securing our boundaries. The logic
of social activist freedom -- like the logic of classical scientific discourse -- is based
on the inviolability of the law of the excluded middle, the necessity of instituting a
clear space of demarcation between 'is' and 'is-not'. That is, freedom is won by means of
a process that closes off attention to the unprecedented and intimate middle ground of our
dramatic interdependence and any meaningful contributions we might otherwise have been
able to offer or receive from it.

Granted the Buddha's unequivocal injunction to see 'is' and 'is-not' as
the "twin barbs" on which all humankind is impaled, the pursuit of freedom so
defined cannot but institute the root conditions for conflict and a preoccupation with
security. The valorization of anonymity and autonomy institutionalizes ignorance and thus
at once shadows and ensures the continued possibility of authoritarianism and coercion.
Because the world of autonomy is, at bottom, an Hegelian one in which all masters of their
circumstances are the antitheses of 'others' who are thereby enslaved, the most carefully
wrought legal institutions -- the products of successful social activism -- may
effectively soften the modalities of our bondage, but will never entirely dissolve them.
Secure borders not only keep threats from coming in, they prohibit free expression or
movement outward.

There is no disputing that social activist movements have led to
dismantling such degrading and highly partial institutions as slavery, segregated
schooling, and sex-specific hiring practices. But because many of the teleological and
strategic building blocks -- that is, the foundational concepts -- of these institutions
have been salvaged in the process of legally managing our 'fair' and 'just' co-existence,
our progress has been in the direction of more complex, global, and invisible institutions
for our regulated mediation. New powers certainly reign, but it is still a reign of power
in which every instance of factual independence is purchased at the cost of increasing
dependence on those (largely legal, but also technological and cultural) institutions that
generically insure our collective right to be left alone and to dictate the tenor of our
circumstances. Degradation has not been abolished. Instead, by virtue of our bias for
dealing with conflicts or social malaise through control, degradation has been woven ever
more finely and essentially into the fabric of our shared narration. The locus of
structurally compromised dignity is, however, not primarily 'you' and 'me' as individuals,
but our relationships as such -- the interpersonal body of our conduct. Thus, although
each one of us is on average better off and freer than ever before, we -- our
marriages, our families, our communities -- are not.

From a Buddhist perspective, this "unexpected" consequence of
social activist success -- like the broken promises of technological salvation -- pivots
on our critical inattention to the karmic nature of the world in which we live. By wrongly
assuming that relationships are logically and ontologically posterior to whatever 'is'
related, and by asserting the "natural" existence of persons as individuals
possessing transcendent rights to autonomy in an essentially impersonal and objective
world, we have tacitly granted an invisible and highly valorized status to a critical
blind spot. Hence the impossibility of mounting a discussion of freedom without invoking
determinism and the perennial divergence of what is good for 'me' and what is good for
'us'.[1] At the same time, since placing too weighty an emphasis on
either 'good' necessarily upsets the ground of our co-existence, and since the control of
any situation can never be truly shared, such existential upsets are from the outset
guaranteed. Blind to our karmic or dramatically interdependent nature and firmly holding
to the either/or logic of the excluded middle, we have developed a notion of freedom that
is contradictory and self-defeating. The very 'freedom' that legally instituted human
rights are intended to secure and preserve is what makes these rights necessary in the
first place.[2]

It was insight into precisely this auto-generative pattern of upset or
trouble (dukkha) that occasioned the Buddha's injunction to see all things as empty
of any essential self-nature -- to relinquish not only our individual habits of
self-identification, but also the security of our cultural inheritance of axiomatic
"facts" about the way things really are and should be. Attending to the
emptiness of all things -- ourselves included -- promises nothing short of a new
"Copernican" revolution by means of which the self-other and freedom-determinism
dichotomies are effectively undermined and concrete avenues opened for the practice of a
truly social activism aimed at dissolving the dramatic conditions of (especially chronic)
suffering.

Emptiness as Horizonless Interconnection and
Mutual Relevance: Freeing Ourselves from the Ideal of Factual Autonomy and the Costs of
Dramatic Anonymity

It is a common misconception that the Buddhist practice of seeing all
things as empty involves a nihilistic detachment from our circumstances. In fact, it
entails carefully freeing things from the univocal assertion of their existence in keeping
with our own, often quite prejudiced, importances. Practicing emptiness makes it possible
for the horizonless and always reciprocal relevance of all things to freely manifest.

As an attribute, the emptiness of all things consists of their unique
ways of arising only as patterns of interdependence or mutual contribution, having
neither fixed and defining essences nor hard boundaries segregating them from one another.
Because such 'essences' and 'boundaries' arise as functions of projected horizons for
relevance, relinquishing these horizons through the practice of emptiness is to
relinquish our own fixed positions, our own segregated identities and limiting
perspectives. The liberation of things from the imposition of identities based on our own
fixed categories is thus inseparable from our own liberation from both the arrogant
illusion of autonomy and the tragic alienation of anonymity. Finally, Buddhist emptiness
does not mean vacuity, but an infinite depth of meaningful interrelationship. Fully
practiced, it occasions horizonless, responsive, and dramatic community -- the elision of
any conceptual, perceptual, or emotional blockages we have to appreciating the uniqueness,
value, and contributory depth of all things.

As epitomized in the attainment of upaaya (unlimited
skill-in-means) by those bodhisattvas (enlightening beings) who have realized
non-reliance and the art of responding without any fixed perspective, fully appreciating
the emptiness of all things is associated with horizonless virtuosity in improvising
meaningful resolutions to trouble. Contrary to the biases of our technological lineage and
legalistic activism, this is not accomplished by controlling circumstances, but through
contributory appreciation; not by means of leveraging power in order to get what is
wanted, but by dedicating unlimited attention-energy to realizing dramatic partnership
with all things. The bodhisattva does not heal through accumulating and wielding power,
but through daanapaaramitaa or the perfection of offering.

Granted this, the ironic nature of the successes of liberal democratic
social activism can be traced to its legal and generic definition of what everyone has a
right to expect or possess. Protecting the rights of a particular class of individuals --
at least for the purposes of protest and legal change -- depends on first establishing
these individuals' essential and identifying characteristics and what they presently lack
or want. But that is also to ignore their emptiness. It is to exclude the always
surprising middle ground on which we find ourselves most intimately related and thus most
capable of meaningfully contributing to -- not getting something from -- our community.
Karmically, rights discourse legitimates the atrophy of those attentive resources needed
to revise the dramatic -- and not just the institutional -- structure of society.

The now common practice of 'settling' of disputes between neighbors
through the filing of lawsuits is a good example of how our dramatic interdependence in
conflict resolution is marginalized. A more structural example is the way in which winning
workers' rights in developing countries typically legitimates further development
along already existing lines, and reinforces -- rather than challenges -- the
hierarchy of power, skewing the benefits of commerce toward those controlling capital and
not toward those contributing labor. Far from liberating workers in any meaningful way,
this finally stifles local creativity and eliminates alternatives to a globalization of
the economy and the commodification of culture.

"People" may be materially assisted through legally securing
their "universal" rights, but they are not thereby helped to more fully offer
themselves to realizing meaningful and corrective intimacy with the conditions that have
been subordinating their own unique interests and creativity. In the absence of such
dramatic intimacy, the only recourse is to change the overt facts of the prevailing
situation -- a course of action in which progress is always correlated with the exercise
of power. This tends to be shortsighted and focused on treating common symptoms of
oppression rather than the network of conditions sponsoring the poverty of a community's
narration. Successfully undermining and then rebuilding the factual institutions of a
society can indeed secure generic freedoms for ultimately generic individuals, but it
cannot cultivate or conserve locally responsive and dramatic creativity. Universal
solutions solve universal problems -- never the unique ones in which alone we find
ourselves personally implicated.

In keeping with the Buddhist teaching of emptiness, Gustavo Esteva
(1987) has argued, for example, that development is not an answer to the needs of
"the poor," but rather a substantial threat to their present and future
well-being. In fact, development thinking manufactures and "benignly" exports
"poverty." It creates classes of sometimes millions of people who must be given
assistance "because" they are powerless to help themselves. As an
alternative, Esteva suggests that strenuous effort must be made to reclaim the commons,
displacing the economics of development, and cultivating instead an ethos of hospitality.
In the absence of such a turn toward meaningfully intimate relationships and away from
generic legalism, the influx of new goods and services will not be conducive to the
realization of vibrant and resilient community, but only increasing dependence on these
services and slavery to the living standards they implicitly impose.

The criticism here is not, however, only that care must be taken not to
help others for the sake of condescension. The teaching of emptiness insists that equal
care be exercised in avoiding the temptation to rationalize doing nothing for others or to
argue that we all have to "pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps." Such
rationales and arguments are possible only on the condition that we ignore the meaningful
interdependence of all things. Pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps is impossible
for the simple reason that none of us are -- or could ever be -- fully independent. But
neither are we ever fully dependent. From a Buddhist perspective, we are not, have never
been, and could never be simply-located, atomic individuals existing or "standing
apart" from one another in objective and purely factual time and space. The prejudice
for taking ourselves most fundamentally to be 'this' and not 'that' -- to be
privileged or not, to be in control or not -- is, at bottom, a culturally sanctioned form
of ignorance that induces both our factual segregation and our relational or narrative
poverty.

As an antidote for such dramatic prejudice, the Buddhist practice of
emptiness is conducive to realizing our horizonless continuity with all things in patterns
of meaningful relationship that arise in a cosmos that is irreducibly karmic -- a cosmos
in which the topography of our individual and shared experience meticulously conforms with
our own values, and in which conflicts and their full resolution are always dramatic.

In a karmic world, there are no clear horizons of responsibility, no
objective warrants for disengagement, and no possibility of abstaining from involvement.
In the absence of any absolute or non-contingent boundaries, the root, moral question can
never be whether we are implicated, but only "in exactly what way, and why?" In
the absence of clear and ontologically fundamental boundaries between self and other, or
between 'this' situation and 'that' one, any tensions between them must be seen as
artifacts -- albeit ones with often quite long and convoluted histories. The perennial
conflict of freedom and duty -- like that between the 'good' of persons and that of
communities -- is not an absolute given, but our own doing: a construct or product of our
karma. Quite fortunately, our karma is always subject to revision.

Activism in Buddhist Perspective: The
Disparate Karma of Social and Societal Strategies

Such a "Copernican" revolution in understanding ourselves has
profound ramifications for how we understand and evaluate social activism. Because
securing the rights of individuals pivots on abstract forms of segregation, it necessarily
institutes an exclusionary middle ground that divorces facts from meaning and that
occasions practical ignorance of the interdependent origination of all things. In
consequence, we fail to see that solving our problems by controlling or managing our
situation necessarily means finding ourselves in controlled or managed relationships. To
compound matters, if we are originally given as relationships, persistently
interacting through the veiling medium of legal anonymity and excluding our dramatic
interdependence from consideration will invariably mean not only our steady alienation
from one another, but our own fragmentation.

Unless corrected, the rationalizing discourse of contemporary life will
carry in opposite directions and place in eventual conflict those 'parts' of ourselves we
refer to as "self" and "other," as "personal" and
"communal," as "emotion" and "reason," as "body"
and "mind," as "conscious" and "unconscious," and as
"spirit" and "flesh." Such a discourse institutionalizes a lack of
compassion and canonizes our critical blind spot as the hallmark of proper reason and
objectivity. Only if we reject the axiom that we are given as individuals will we see that
our most basic right cannot and should not be -- as one United States
Supreme Court justice remarked -- to be "left alone" in well-managed
co-existence with one another, but rather to develop truly virtuosic and meaningful
relationships.[3]

An immediate rejoinder to this is that -- aside from being
"politically na´ve" -- such an inversion of the priority of structural
facticity over meaning is liable to induce an acceptance of the inequalities of the status
quo rather than a strenuous effort to challenge them. But like the specter of (epistemic
or cultural) relativism that troubles most theorists of postmodern liberalism, this worry
is a rhetorical consequence of the dialectic of independence and dependence. The Buddhist
teachings of the interdependence and impermanence of all things direct us toward seeing
any fixed status or view (d.r.sti) as evidence of ignorance and error, never as an
absolute fact or ideal. Buddhist practice is thus resolutely counter-cultural or critical
of the status quo, demonstrating that all things and situations -- from our most hallowed
institutions to "reality" itself -- are always negotiable. Since no situation is
or could ever be dramatically intractable, there are no excuses for repeated errors or
omissions, no excuses for sitting on our hands waiting for things to get better. The only
relevant question is one of strategy.

I have argued elsewhere (1996, chapter three) for the heuristic value
of drawing a contrast between sociality (an orientation of conduct toward realizing
improvised, increasingly dramatic, and virtuosic interrelationship) and societality (an
orientation of conduct toward bringing about our regulated and factual co-existence
through predictably role-mediated patterns of interaction). To the extent that our conduct
or dramatic "middle ground" is social, it means increasing intimacy and
creative vulnerability; to the extent that it is societal, we find ourselves disposed in
thought, feeling, speech, and action toward developing relatively fixed identities or
institutions and promoting factual security. Sociality fosters the conditions of uniquely
meaningful contribution to our dramatic interdependence; societality, the conditions of
generically controlling the structure of our managed co-existence. All societies, of
course, arise through the patterned complexion or interweaving of sociality and
societality.

According to this distinction, much of what has been called
"social activism" has been correlated with and promoted an increasingly societal
movement of our narration -- the realization of an increasingly rational life-world,
globalizing economic "development," the fragmentation of community and family,
and the legal consolidation of individual and class rights. As such, it has ably secured
and managed the interests of factually subordinate but ideally autonomous 'individuals'
who are themselves the end products of both a technological lineage biased toward control
and those political, philosophical, and religions institutions that have systematized this
bias.

A truly social form of activism would by contrast be oriented toward
enhancing our capacity for uniquely responsive contribution, not increasing capacities for
living "as we want." It would express an ethics of responsibility, not one of
protest or refusal; a bias toward improvisation and the unprecedented, not regulation and
predictability; a focus on realizing what it means to have no-self and to refrain from
discharging blame. Rather than legally ignoring our uniqueness, by aiming at dramatically
satisfying interdependence, truly social activism would facilitate improvising creative
and surprising communities in which our differences always and thankfully make a
difference.

The karmic implications of these two forms of activism are profoundly
disparate. Like technologies oriented toward control, to the extent that societal activism
is successful, it brings about the conditions of its continued necessity and success. In
much the same way that our technological tradition has promised, but not delivered, a life
of ease and leisure,[4]societal activism promises an end of inequality
and imposition while instituting a need for ever finer institutional distinctions,
definitions, and constraints. Societal activism produces legal horizons. That is its
business. And the more effective it is, the more effective it must be.

Just as getting better at getting what we want invariably means getting
better at wanting, getting better at legally insuring rights and freedoms for generic
populations will mean developing further legal mechanisms for specifying and enforcing
those legally defined rights and freedoms. But if regulated freedom stands in need of
"external" enforcement -- that is, new patterns of policing and not just new
policies -- it establishes fertile ground for new hierarchies of control. Those
institutions which police the enforcement of legally won rights and freedoms will also
need policing. The circle is, again, finally a vicious one. Freedom becomes an
end-in-itself -- an abstract status -- that in an irreducibly dynamic world can only be
maintained by dramatic disengagement or the loss of meaning.

Instead of concentrating on patterns of conduct oriented toward the
institutional guarantee of generic rights and statuses, the basic strategy of a truly social
activism is to foster appreciative and contributory virtuosity -- primarily through
encouraging practices for continuously relinquishing our horizons for relevance,
responsibility, and readiness.[5] The karmic ramifications of this shift
away from institutional control are both radical and profound.

First, if consciousness is understood as irreducibly relational,
appreciation cannot be reduced to an emotionally decorative and dramatically superfluous
acceptance of things as they are. To the contrary, appreciation means attending to or
relating with things in such a way the value of our situation continuously increases or
appreciates. Karmically, this not only develops the conditions for living in circumstances
that are increasingly valuable, but being more and more valuably placed within them.
Moreover, because our situation is always dramatic, the practice of appreciation is
inseparable from discerning and attuning ourselves to our situation's potential for
superlative meaning -- the realization of dramatic and contributory creativity. That is,
in sharp contrast with the karma of controloriented conduct, the better we get at
contributing to our situation in a dramatically satisfying way, the more opportunity we
will have to do so. Truly social activism means realizing our situation as one of
horizonless value and opportunity through amplifying the unique capacities each of us has
for sui-shih-ying-yung or "according with our situation, responding as
needed." The result of radically social activism is a dramatic revision of our
present circumstances as the bodhima.n.dala or "place of
enlightenment."

As implied in this four-character narrative of Ch'an Buddhist
enlightenment, increasing virtuosity in contribution (daanapaaramitaa, or
perfection of offering) is inseparable from increasing virtuosity in appreciation (praj~naapaaramitaa,
or the perfection of wisdom). If appreciation is not a subjective decoration of our
circumstances, neither is it an attainment that comes -- as is sometimes maintained --
only after we have established sufficiently comfortable and edifying circumstances for
"serious" meditative discipline and the exercise of compassion to be
"really" possible. Again, if consciousness consists of patterns of
interdependence from which we abstract such things as 'individual beings' and their
'environments', there is no precedent for assuming that the perfection of wisdom depends
on the realization of certain material comforts or that factually altering our
circumstances is more effective or basic than changing minds. In a thoroughly karmic
world, attention and responsive activity are separable -- if at all -- only on heuristic
grounds, not ontological ones. Changing how we place ourselves in attending a situation is
already to transform it. Appreciative virtuosity directly alters the complexion of our
interdependence with all things -- changing at once our 'world' and 'who we are within
it'.

Societal activism begins with a recognition of the "poverty"
attendant on membership in one or another class of "oppressed" or
"structurally subordinated" people. On this basis, it works to secure rights to
pursue redress -- rights, that is, to command a factual change of status or circumstance.
When a society has decayed to the point that adequate food, shelter, education, and
medicine are no longer readily available, such factual corrections are imperative.
That is, they should no longer be considered matters of choice. But for karmic reasons,
settling for strictly factual solutions should be seen as a last resort. Consider, for
example, the effect of stepping in to correct the systematically unjust treatment of a
child by a playground bully or a female worker by her sexually predatory male supervisor.
Physically intervening may effectively halt a given instance of bullying or harassment,
but it is unlikely to dramatically alter the relationship between the persons
involved -- the actual site of the conflict in its dramatic sense. If anything, outside
intervention by an ultimate or transcendent "authority" is likely to drive the
"bully" into either greater brutality when unmonitored or increasingly insidious
subtlety. Either way, the unique contributions the bullied child or co-worker might make
to the creative life of the situation and the dramatic reform of the "bully"
will likely remain marginal.

Structurally, an analogy can be made to all instances where some group
of people is subordinated, silenced, or dramatically impoverished by those with greater
access to power and control. Karmically, unintended changes in our situation -- changes
that, like those legislated from "above," do not require us to express our own
creativity -- cannot lead to meaningfully addressing the conflicting values and
presuppositions that have sponsored our present trouble. While changing a society's legal
institutions to prohibit certain forms of overt oppression may alter the factual
complexion of that society, this is no guarantee that the expression of prejudicial
discrimination and subordination will be curtailed. Indeed, a more typical outcome is that
the bases of oppression will shift and become both more varied and less ostensive.

Truly social activism must be rooted in recognizing the contributory
potential, the creativity, of the "oppressed." That is, its first step must be
to stop moving in the direction of attending to one or another form of 'poverty' or 'want'
and establishing legal precedents for its factual redress. Rather than placing limits on
conduct and effectively discouraging horizonless responsibility while leaving the
presuppositions of the status quo essentially unquestioned, social activism must refrain
from accepting the current definition of the situation, the current "facts"
about exactly what is wrong or conflicted.

Karmically, the "facts" of our experience invariably
correspond to what we have meant in the past -- the direction in which we have
conducted or guided ourselves together.[6] Like a mango which is both the
final product of a tree and the occasion of its generational continuity, meaning in a
Buddhist sense is artha -- at once the fruit or result of our value-informed
activity and a precedent or further condition thereof. That is, meaning expresses
the recursive relationship through which our intentional activity feeds back into our
'experience' and conduct as an initial 'environmental' condition. Far from being either a
subjective reading of a text or situation, or an objective and essential content thereof,
meaning consists of the dramatic furtherance of our narration -- the valuing of our
interdependence.

Thus, our factual status at any given time should not be seen as
the primary cause of our suffering or troubles. Rather, it is through our inability to
improvise a viable and meaningful path around or through our situation that suffering
arises. Suffering is not a fact about the way things are, but the announcement of
narrative impasse. It consists of the blockage, truncation, or repetitive frustration of
our dramatic furtherance due to a scarcity of dramatic resources -- those attentive
capacities required for virtuosically according with our situation and responding as
needed. In Buddhist terms, suffering signals our inability to shift the meaning of things
away from samsaara (a world narration characterized by repeated conflict, trouble,
and disappointment) toward nirvaa.na (a world narration in which the conditions of
ignorance, conflict, trouble, and wanting are continuously and thoroughly uprooted).

Seeing meaning as dramatic furtherance challenges both the
self-centered bias of consequentialism and our control-biased disposition for seeing
causation as a fundamentally linear process of influence. For the realization of a truly
social form of activism, this is a crucial move -- one that allows us to see beyond the
no-win dichotomy of either re-organizing or ordering society person by person or doing so
through generically altering the structure of the interpersonal as such. What we begin
seeing instead is the possibility of changing society through directly and jointly
revising the valence of our dramatic interdependence or karma as such. Although the
analogy has limits, just as shifts between the "two women" and "vase"
views of the standard gestalt drawing do not require redrawing the picture line by line,
dramatic changes in the structure of society need not depend on rebuilding its
institutional structures brick by brick or law by law.

Importantly, if changing our patterns of attention necessarily changes
the pattern of our interdependence as such, and if all things are dynamic or irreducibly
characterized by impermanence, nothing can be more deleterious in our effort to relieve
suffering or end conflict than inflexible habits of thought, speech, and action.
Meaningful -- that is, karmically effective -- solutions to our personal and communal
troubles can never be imposed or universally legislated. They must be improvised.

If this much can be said about the first step of truly social
engagement, about the second it is possible only to affirm that it must be taken locally,
and in a direction compatible with eliciting the meaningful participation of all concerned
in realizing an increasingly valuable situation -- not the institution of a new
"state of affairs," but the improvisation of a new direction for our dramatic
interdependence. Good examples of the face of truly social activism can be seen in the
Sarvodaya Shramadana movement begun by A. T. Ariyaratne in rural Sri Lanka and the work of
the Thai activist Sulak Sivaraksa.

Responding to the devastating decay forced upon Sri Lanka's rural
communities by centuries of colonialism followed by various "development"
schemes designed to forward the ends of global capitalism, Ariyaratne began working with
villagers to help them amplify their own creative resources and through these reverse the
conditions of personal and communal decay. Emerging from the crucible of shared physical
labor on locally determined public works projects have been a diverse range of truly local
and non-sectarian movements toward answering particular village needs by appreciating each
village's unique situation and eliciting its indigenous, dramatic resources.[7]

Sivaraksa's approach has been to radically apply the teachings of
emptiness and karma in the context of critically evaluating the effects of Western,
individual-biased development and political ideals. Sivaraksa has thus insisted (1992)
that a first responsibility in any viable form of activism is attending to the quality of
our dramatic interdependence and taking full account of our communal karma -- the karma
being created, for instance, by the unchecked proliferation of technologies which are
marketed as value-neutral or morally-transparent and are not.

In different contexts, Ariyaratne and Sivaraksa both exhort the
"oppressed" seekers of rights to challenge this "disadvantaged" status
and direct their attention to the collusion of values between the rhetoric of development
and liberal democracy and the conditions of their present oppression. In neither case does
this entail refusing to recognize the value of democracy in its broadest sense or the
importance of carefully integrating local, national, and international economies. But as
would be expected in the context of (Buddhist) social activism, greatest emphasis is
placed on discerning the patterns of attention and value that have been conducive to
trouble or conflict and then redirecting these toward liberation -- not freedom from some
abstract form of poverty or merely material want, but uniquely realized and meaningful
virtuosity.

So thoroughly ingrained is our prejudice toward the efficiency of
control-biased strategies for change that talk of amplifying dramatic resources can only
seem disastrously na´ve. From the perspective of scientific and technological realism, we
must first and foremost alter the facts of our co-existence. Any changes in the meaning of
our present situation and how we are interdependent will -- if necessary -- follow. The
Buddhist rejoinder is that the fact/value distinction -- like that between 'reality' and
'appearance', or 'truth' and 'belief' -- is an artifact with very particular precedents
and uses. For most "oppressed" people, accepting the "facts" of their
'poverty' or 'subordination' is to capitulate to the definitions imposed by those who
oppress through an exclusive super-ordination of their own values and interests. Half the
battle is then already lost. Given our irreducible interdependence, any truly viable form
of liberation must mean dissolving the conditions of oppression and liberating all
those bound by them -- the 'oppressors' as well as the 'oppressed'. If this is to be
possible, there is a strong sense in which the "facts" must be denied.

Opening the Borders: Taking Responsibility
for What Society Means

What we call the "facts" of our situation -- the way things
'objectively' have been, are now, and are likely to remain or become -- are best seen as
commitments to particular patterns of intentional activity or dramatic interdependence.
That is, they reveal our karma. Facts -- and, indeed, what we typically refer to as
"matter" -- consist of continuously reinforced definitions of a particular point
of view. Facts announce the status of things, their mode of existing within the
hierarchy of our values, but they also announce our own status -- the particular way in
which we take a stand on things being either 'this' or 'that' for us. Granted the
Buddha's claim that 'is' and 'is-not' are the twin barbs on which all humankind is
impaled, the world of facts is -- among other things -- the primordial medium of conflict.

But if all things are truly impermanent and empty, no "state of
affairs" (even a state of consciousness) is naturally occurring. What we refer to as
"states of affairs," "individuals," and the "conflicts" they
suffer are not natural events, but rather announcements of horizons peculiar to the point
of view we have adopted -- horizons or boundaries that, like all artifacts, can only be
established and maintained through fixing our own position and thus limiting the free flow
of attention and energy. The facts of our situation define the specific -- and typically
habitual -- ways our attention energy is bound.[8]

The practice of emptiness -- relinquishing those horizons of relevance
through which are constituted both our 'selves' and the 'things' we experience -- thus
occasions the release of previously bound attention-energy. Practicing emptiness means
letting go of our karma. It means freeing dramatic resources that would otherwise be
devoted to rehearsing the various identities essential to defining the recursive
topography of our narration. Doing so is, in the most immediate way possible, to extirpate
the conditions for narrative impasse or suffering. From a Buddhist perspective, power is
not needed to induce change, but only to stop, retard, or define
it in the ways needed to set up and maintain some status or form of (self)existence. Power
is not needed to erase boundaries or end suffering, but only to render them chronic and
apparently intractable.

History would seem to tell us otherwise. Even allowing for the caution
that historical narratives are themselves woven in the liminal space of empowerment, the
evidence would seem incontrovertible: power may never have been sufficient for engineering
social change, but it has always been necessary. In the present context, for example, how
could one possibly deny the crucial reliance of activists on the power of the media in
successfully engineering the manifestly positive institutional reforms needed to lobby for
and secure basic human rights around the globe? Then again, the deeper the shadows in
which we stand, the less visible is the ground between us.

Consider the issue or outcome of rights legislation. Legally instituted
rights guarantee everyone a generic share of society's resources and a role in negotiating
its structural organization. Property rights, for instance, allow peasants to claim
ownership of land. Some human rights guarantee minimum standards for working conditions;
others guarantee access to public media for the expression of dissenting views. These are
significant gains for all affected individuals. But at the same time, property rights held
by corporate individuals guarantee the possibility of establishing monopolies on
seed production, the patenting of plant and animal species, and the operation of
"farms" of titanic scale. The entirely legal exercise of these rights by
corporations has been correlated with the demise of the family farm, the eradication of
locally managed seed stock, the flight of rural 'poor' into the city, and the apparent
irrationality of truly vernacular economies. Similarly, rights of access to media have
allowed for both organizing activist movements and organizing "advertising"
campaigns of such magnitude that consumption has reached epidemic proportions and now very
seriously threatens the planet's ecological health.

The technologies used in gathering and wielding power on a globally
significant scale do not create a level playing field. On the contrary, they were
developed to realize and maintain extremely steep hierarchies of advantage in an economy
of privilege -- an economy in which the most powerful will always be able to dispose any
prevailing "states of affairs" to their advantage.[9] Like
technologies that secure their indispensability by becoming more "user
friendly," those in power will insure their advantages by listening to and
accommodating activist lobbies as needed. The powerful may even undergo personnel changes
from time to time. But the overall imbalance of power will remain unchallenged. In
spite of any appearances to the contrary, the game of power is thoroughly rigged.

Fortunately, it is not a game we must play. Accumulating and wielding
power is not a prerequisite of meaningful social change. But we will not quit the
contest of power until we place highest priority on attending to the quality of our
interdependence as such. We must first see, that is, the fallacy in claiming that "if
something is good for each and every one of us, it must be good for all of us." In a
dramatic cosmos, placing a priority on using power to leverage changes in the facts of our
circumstances is like trying to write a new song by altering either the fingerings of
already-playing guitarists (the dispositions of the powerful) or the structure of their
guitar necks (society's institutional structure). It is much better to try improvising
along with them in such a way that the music shifts harmonic and melodic focus directly
and of its own accord. In the same way that skillful contributions to an ongoing musical
event allow its meaning to be revised smoothly and directly, bringing about social change
through attending directly to the quality and disposition of our dramatic interdependence
is not only more efficient than doing so by exerting control over the factual conditions
of our situation, it opens possibilities for contributory and creative parity that would
otherwise be quite literally inconceivable.[10]

Like the benefits of extensive, but entirely "passive,"
martial arts training -- made possible, say, by wearing a properly programmed robotic suit
-- the benefits of societal activism are quantifiably real, but limited. Objectively and
individually assessed, such training will undeniably improve our range of motion -- our
degrees of freedom. But in situational crisis, having repeatedly gone through the motions
of either tai chi ch'uan or the exercise of a legally-enacted civil society will
prove to have been of little if any help. Instead of virtuosically according with the
unique character of the present crisis and responding as needed to improvise its
meaningful resolution, we will find ourselves just as likely as ever to freeze, not
knowing what to do, or reverting to old patterns of victimization. If our practices do not
transform how well we appreciate our situation, they will never enhance our
capacity for contributing to the meaningful resolution of our troubles. On the
contrary, we will continue repeating and not truly revising our karma.

In shifting our attention from the controlled redress of factual
oppression and structural inequity to improvising novel conditions for meaningful
contribution, we initiate a decisive return to dramatic immediacy and the disciplines of
responsive creativity. Doing so, we are no longer obliged (in tragic imitation of Zeno and
his paradoxes of motion) to carry society across the dramatic "dead spot"
between disparate states of (political, social, or economic) affairs in an infinite
regress that demands all our available attention and energy to no meaningful effect. It
also frees us from the contradictory logic of either rebuilding society one person at a
time or by way of mass movements organized and granted effective power by control-biased
technologies. With the globalization of the economy and the ubiquitous spread of
information technologies, finding a middle path between these logical contraries is
absolutely crucial. We are now at the point of crossing a critical threshold of utility
for using societal strategies to bring about meaningful changes in the way we structure
our narration -- a threshold beyond which these structures will become increasingly
conducive to the atrophy of our capacities for both appreciation and meaningful
contribution. In the "global village," fighting fire with fire is not a
viable option.

This is not, however, to justify withdrawing into a shell of
self-concern and ignoring the extremely disadvantaged factual status of various peoples
around the world. It is not to justify the perverse belief that the teaching of karma
entails seeing disadvantaged people as simply "deserving" what they've got. Nor
is it to justify the claim that since the topography of anyone's experience is a function
of their past and present values and intentions, there is finally not much we can
do for them. The difference between our karma and their karma depends on
establishing fixed horizons of relevance, responsibility, and readiness that do not
encourage, but prohibit, the realization of appreciative and contributory virtuosity.

In spite of its apparent successes, what has been called "social
activism" has not promoted such virtuosity. The United Nations' Declaration on Human
Rights and other institutions like it can be therapeutic in a limited sense, but they will
never bring about the kind of dramatic healing needed in order to realize increasingly
meaningful lives in truly liberating and harmonious community. To the contrary, it has
encouraged a continuing focus on changing the facts of our situation from a sa.msaaric
perspective -- a perspective from which the best we can hope to achieve is the enjoyment
of relatively equal degrees of anonymity and autonomy within the limits of universally
regulated co-existence. The task of any truly social form of activism must be to improvise
new and dramatically satisfying paths across the continually renewed borders of sa.msaara
and beyond the attachments we develop to our varied statuses within them.

It will be objected that there is nothing more liable to contest than
the definition of an "increasingly meaningful or dramatically satisfying life."
And without a doubt, we cannot say with any precision what meaning is. We
cannot even conclusively determine what the meaning of a given situation is
or is-not. Meaning simply does not exist. And yet, in the context of the Buddhist
practice of emptiness, that is all well and good. The original nature of all things is to
be meaningfully related or relevant to one another. Contrary to popular opinion, the
meaning of life is not "something" to be found or discovered -- a pre-existing
and transcendent order that makes sense out of the vicissitudes of our day-to-day affairs.
Rather, the meaning of life is given directly in the movement of our narration, in our
unique ways of participating in irreducibly dramatic interdependence with all the specific
partners we have in these affairs -- our homes, neighborhoods, and cities; our
country-sides and wildernesses and those with whom we share them. We can ignore the
meaning of our lives, but only if we are willing to walk backward into our future
together.

According to the Mahaayaana teaching of emptiness, there is no way of
ultimately separating either our sufferings or our liberation from those of others. Our
most basic right is not to be left alone or to individually prosper. Rather, it is
to contribute ever more fully to our dramatic and liberating interdependence, freeing
ourselves from all chronic suffering and wants as they arise. In spite of any apparent
naivete involved in doing so, we should neither aim at nor settle for less.

Notes

1. It is no coincidence that where persons have been understood as
patterns of relationship (classical Chinese culture comes to mind as a prime example) and
not as simply existing-in or standing-apart within them, the free will/determinism
dichotomy has been either entirely absent or of extremely marginal currency. In such
cultural contexts, liberal democratic human rights discourse has often been seen as
somewhat misplaced. See Ames (1988) and Rosemont (1988) for a discussion, for example, of
contemporary Confucian perspectives on human rights discourse. Return to
text

2. This is not to suggest, of course, that a cultural bias for seeing
persons as relational in nature can be strictly correlated with an absence of structural
inequities and abusive denials of dignity. In both traditional China and Buddhist
Thailand, for example, personal freedoms have by no means been unlimited. All societies
are self-regulating in one degree and fashion or another -- whether by law or by ritual.
The point is to recognize the regulative fertility of conceiving freedom as located in
individual and autonomous existence rather than in meaningful relationship. Freedom
associated with individual autonomy tends to be more abstract than not, even when most
"real." Thus, while Americans can vacation "wherever they want," they
readily allow profit-seeking advertisers to direct their wants. Return to
text

3. See Hershock (2000) for a discussion of the distinction between
dramatic and factual human rights, and their diverse relationship to the problem of
alienation. Return to text

4. For more on the dishonored promises of technology, see Hershock
(1999), especially chapters three and four. Return to text

5. For an extended discussion of the practice of relinquishing horizons
for relevance, responsibility, and readiness in the context of Ch'an enlightenment, see my
Liberating Intimacy, chapter six. Return to text

6. It should be noted that if consciousness obtains only as the
relationship of an 'organism' and its 'environment', neither intention nor meaning can be
construed as purely subjective or self-centered. Karma cannot be strictly individual.
Hence the Buddha's teaching that while all intentional activities will have experienced
and meaningfully-related consequences, it cannot be said whether it is "the same
individual" or "a different individual" who will be subject to these
consequences. If all things arise in conditioned interdependence and not through linear
determination, knower and known, self and other, or actor and acted-upon can be separated
only through a process of abstraction. Return to text

7. Joanna Macy (1985) has written a concise but very useful and
philosophical analysis of the Sarvodaya movement and its novel, Buddhism-informed approach
to development. Return to text

8. The relationship between bound forms of energy and identity cannot
limited, of course, to what might be dismissed as the "nature" of subjectivity.
It is true, as well, of living organisms that they can only remain relatively "the
same" or "self-identical" through consuming environmental energy. Indeed,
all things can be seen as constituted through taking energy out of free circulation --
energy that is released when the identity of a thing (for example, a plutonium atom, a
lump of coal, a mango, or a society) is "broken down." Return
to text

9. For a wide variety of perspectives on the ways in which ostensibly
"democratic" technological advances -- high speed computing, for instance --
disadvantage the average person and dispose society toward corporate authoritarianism, see
Mander and Goldsmith, 1996. Return to text

10. An important point here is that societal activism's own claims to
the contrary, it cannot avoid being energy inefficient. With its bias toward control, it
can no more avoid reproducing the conditions of conflict -- and so the need for
reinforcing or enforcing power -- that we could get a guitar trio to happily change songs
by physically interrupting and redirecting their fingering patterns. Resistance -- violent
or otherwise -- would only be natural. Return to text